


A Week In The Sun

by althusserarien (ArmchairElvis)



Category: House M.D.
Genre: Alternate Universe, Dreams, F/M, Gen, Nightmares
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-01-22
Updated: 2009-01-22
Packaged: 2017-11-18 10:06:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,928
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/559798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArmchairElvis/pseuds/althusserarien
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>House wakes up whole.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Week In The Sun

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [](http://nightdog-barks.livejournal.com/profile)[**nightdog_barks**](http://nightdog-barks.livejournal.com/), [](http://nomad1328.livejournal.com/profile)[**nomad1328**](http://nomad1328.livejournal.com/), [](http://chewy-101.livejournal.com/profile)[**chewy_101**](http://chewy-101.livejournal.com/) and [](http://shutterbug-12.livejournal.com/profile)[**shutterbug_12**](http://shutterbug-12.livejournal.com/) for reading and making US language suggestions. [](http://nomad1328.livejournal.com/profile)[**nomad1328**](http://nomad1328.livejournal.com/) prompted me to write a fic "where House is miraculously cured for absolutely no reason at all" via the [fics I'd never write](http://joe-pike-junior.livejournal.com/173146.html) meme. Feel free to make a suggestion. Thanks for reading!

On Monday morning, House wakes up whole. Just like that. It’s earlier than he usually wakes up naturally, a quarter to seven, and there’s a bizarre electric feeling in his nerves and his veins, the nervous system equivalent of the sweet ozone smell that drifts through the air before you drive through a thunderstorm.

The last thing he remembers is falling asleep in front of the television. The oversaturated blood-and-guts colour of the cheesy slasher movie he was watching has been replaced by the usual traffic reports on the usual pileups, and it’s all so normal and gradual that he walks halfway across the room towards the bathroom and his morning piss before he realises that he’s hardly limping and he isn’t in pain.

It’s not like the missing muscle and nerve have grown back. It’s like it was never gone at all, like the last ten years were a dream or an episode of pins and needles brought on by sitting in the same position for too long. A nightmare rapidly fading in the suddenly-sober light of the day after. It's so cuttingly bright in the room that for a few seconds it's almost unbearable.

He never stops to question the why, because this is how it's supposed to be, this is _him_ on the better side of a blood clot and a run of bad luck. This is how it would have been if the cards fell right, if lightning didn’t strike, if the spectre of piss-poor luck hadn’t pointed its finger.

He runs. He runs so hard that it jars every bone in his body. His heart thumps in his chest like a drum, and his ears ring with it. The air tastes better when he’s gasping for it, when he draws it in so fast at six-minute-mile pace that it sears deep in his chest like plunging through icewater.

He finds a drinking fountain somewhere on the University campus. Under the bright sun the grass is so green it almost looks Technicolor-false, like an old movie. He draws a hand across the back of his mouth, and for a second the droplets of water gleam dark like blood.

Before he sleeps he thinks of the complete, warm feeling in his muscles, the straightness of his back, how nothing feels overstretched or overused. He falls into sleep quickly, and he dreams of bright lights and someone calling his name.

 

On Tuesday, House fucks Cuddy up against the wall in his living room. This is too right and too rough to be just _sex_ , this is _fucking_. She wraps her legs around his waist and buries her fingers in his hair, groaning and pushing against him. This is a moment stripped of romance and petty euphemisms. There is no awkward fumble across the room, no unspoken apologies.

What makes it better is that he’s dreamed about this. This is a fantasy in living breathing colour.

Afterwards he trails her into the bedroom. She doesn’t say anything. He slowly realises as the afternoon sun comes through the window, red behind his eyelids, that his body is younger, the body he had when he was thirty-five. As she pulls him down onto the bed something flashes in the back of his head. A memory of movement, gone.

Later on in Tuesday night he has sex again, slower this time. In the early hours of Wednesday morning she leaves. He sleeps, waking to the sort of ravenous, empty-stomach hunger he’s forgotten. The sort of hunger that comes from labour, from exercise. Not the sort of angry, empty hunger that comes from coffee and the memory of throwing up too many painkillers.

 

On Wednesday, he tries out yoga. It’s boring. It’s one less thing to wonder about, though. He runs again instead. The pavement is so hot he imagines he can feel it through the bottom of his sneakers. Halfway into his third mile he falls over and skins his knee and shin slightly. There’s more raw skin than anything, but as he stands up and brushes off his stinging palms to inspect the damage, he watches as a few droplets of blood leak out of the scrape. It doesn’t hurt at all.

 

On Thursday he drives like a maniac. He doesn’t remember where he got the car, exactly; a dealer, perhaps. Maybe he had it locked up in a garage somewhere. He finds something worth listening to on the radio and ratchets the cherry red Corvette right up through the gears.

Out away from Princeton the sky above is a washed-out blue, a hint of the clean scent of rained-on bitumen floating above the smell of exhaust and warm leather. He squints and drives into the sun, feeling the speed and the power of the engine rumbling beneath his feet. Later on he watches the setting sun reflect off a hard river of baked car hoods. He cuts around a line of red tail lights and runs straight through a stoplight, through a sudden wall of horns.

 

On Friday, House does his job. He figures it’s about time he does a little work. He treats a guy with a particularly gruesome bleeding problem. In the morning things look a little hairy: the patient sits silently on his bed, his eyes glassy and sunken with dehydration, holding a Kleenex with an ever-widening red spot against his nose. A small round splash of blood stains the front of his gown.

House buys himself a coffee and bounds up every single flight of stairs from the ground floor to the roof. Wilson stands facing away from the door. House doesn't remember paging him, wonders why he's up here.

“Attilla the Hun died of a nosebleed on his wedding night.” Wilson’s voice is abstract somehow, remote.

House sips at the coffee, grimacing at the weak, watery taste. He should have added sugar. “Supposedly.”

Wilson keeps his back to House, leaning on the wall, looking out over the parking lot.  
“Is your patient dead yet?”

“Of course not,” House says, the bitter metallic taste of the awful hospital coffee in his mouth. He stares at the back of Wilson's head. “Don’t you think there’s something else we should be talking about?”

He bounces on the balls of his feet to emphasise, to show what he can do. He could be playing lacrosse right now. He can run. He can duck and weave, he can crouch down to tie his shoelaces, he can sit against the wall right here and draw his legs close. He can touch his toes, and considering the ever-increasing spare tire he’s carrying around his middle, that’s probably more than Wilson can do without grunting like a wounded buffalo.

Wilson turns around. There’s a spot on his tie, House notices. He’s really letting himself go. “Weren’t you wearing that shirt yesterday?”

There's something off about Wilson, something like a stronger version of his "wet-blanket" face. House isn't sure if Wilson is even _seeing_ him.

House hears the treble wail of an ambulance down below them, the siren undercut by squealing tires.

Wilson checks his pager and walks quickly to the door. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, House. Go check on your patient. He’s bleeding out.”

House goes home and swings his legs up on his couch and watches television. The shows are the same, but there’s something better about them, somehow. Maybe it’s because he’s not in pain, or maybe it’s because he’s not halfway into his evening Vicodin haze, maybe maybe maybe. Some sort of drunken brawl wakes him up around midnight (strange in this area, but not unheard of), but he thinks nothing of it. He wakes up in the morning to the television blaring annoyingly loud cartoons and bright light streaming through the open curtains.

 

 

On Saturday, House gets really drunk. Incredibly and shamelessly hammered. He starts with a beer to get his feet under him (haha) but moves on to shots as quick as the bartender can pour them.

He’s staggering back from the men’s room when he notices that Wilson is sitting at the bar, facing the front. He's looking around like he's surreptitiously searching for someone. Did House text or call and forget that he did it?

He remembers with a sudden cold spike of lucidity that there's something he's been meaning to do (on average, once a week) for fifteen years or so.

“Hey, Wilson,” he says, and he steps forward neatly, putting his left leg in front.

“Wha-,” Wilson says, and then House bunches his fist and cold-cocks Wilson square in the jaw. He leans back to steady himself with his other hand on the bar as Wilson's head spins around and his body follows it. He hits the floor like a sack of wet laundry. A bar stool falls over, but no one else says or does anything. The small clot of people around the pool table are frozen in place, their faces dark and obscure. The other people at the bar stay hunched over, their faces turned away from House’s.

House is ready for mindless violence, for scraped knuckles and handfuls of shirts and the sudden scuffling rush of voices and adrenaline. But Wilson stares up at him from the floor, his eyes dark and panicked, and House realises that the room is spinning like a top. He can’t look at the walls, churning brown, so he stares at the floor beneath his feet, a salty taste in his mouth.

“House?”

The salty taste in his mouth evolves, and he realises it’s blood. He can taste blood. It’s organic and so strong it's almost sweet. House tries to sit on a bar stool, but his legs go weak before he can make it. He ends up crumpled on the floor, something gritty beneath him. A string of pink spit escapes from his mouth and lands next to his jean-clad knee, and he clutches his stomach in a sudden and savage wave of nausea.

“House?”

Wilson’s voice gets louder. There’s a pain in House’s chest. He doesn't breathe. He remembers doing a diving course once, how they tell you not to hold your breath underwater. If you do that, your lungs explode. Then a fresh corkscrew of pain makes its way through his leg, and he gasps and breathes again. He doesn’t know what this is, he doesn’t know _where_ he is.

“Hey, House. C’mon.”

The lights in here are so bright, it’s weird. House crumples up his eyes because they hurt, and all of a sudden Wilson’s voice is close to his ear, and he can feel hands on his shoulders, and there are voices rushing everywhere, overlapping, fading in and out like a car radio in a tunnel, and there’s a ringing in his ears and a pain in his head that goes on and on until

snap.

 

The pain, his body, is there. Like it never went away. But House knows better.

He licks his dry lips. “I know better,” he says, and there’s the sting of misuse in his throat. The salty taste of saline IV in his mouth.

Then Cuddy’s face is floating above him like a rather concerned balloon, Wilson hovering on the periphery with shadows like bruises under his eyes. Lights shine in his eyes, someone gives a hurried order.

“What do you remember?” Cuddy says. “What was that you just said?”

“Nothing,” House says. It’s a lie, but it’s all he can bring himself to say.

 

 **A/N:** I think I read about the "lungs exploding" thing in a Jeffery Deaver book.


End file.
